Many daily activities, and particularly sports-related activities, involve cognitive skills in general, and cognitive control processes in particular, such as executive control, that are responsible for aspects such as planning and sequencing activities, focusing attention, selecting between environmental aspects, switching and dividing attention between different actions, mental rotation, peripheral vision and perception, pattern recognition etc. Such skills are involved in every decision and move of an athlete, and the level of such skills greatly affects the performance of the athlete or any other individual performing a task. Training can significantly improve the level of cognitive skills, and various training programs are used to achieve such an improvement. Such programs include physical and simulated exercises.
Studies have shown that complex cognitive skills in general, and psychomotor skills in particular can be trained in laboratory settings and transferred to real-life job or task settings such as aviation (Gopher et al., 1994; Phillips et al., 1993; Ortiz, 1994; Dennis and Harris, 1998). For example, practice effects on the ability of subjects to localize targets in the periphery have been shown (Ball et al., 1988), with effects being maintained over a six-month period. Other studies have shown that attention control, executive control and other control skills such as switching between tasks, dividing attention and selecting between speed and accuracy emphases can also be trained and transferred (Gopher et al., 2000; Armony and Gopher, 2002; Kramer et al., 1995; Gopher et al., 1994). A list of references is attached.
Airplane or helicopter pilots may use a flight simulator to practice physical and mental skills associated with flying an aircraft. These simulators allow both physical and cognitive fidelity to the various cognitive and physical actions performed during flying. However, other types of tasks are more difficult to train with a simulator, and/or a typical high physical fidelity simulator is inadequate for the task to be trained. For example, sports such as basketball, which require a large amount of physical movement, including movement of the body of subject across a large court, are difficult if not impossible to train with currently available simulators.
Many cognitive trainers known to the art are dedicated to specific task components, such as peripheral vision. Other known simulation systems which replicate various aspects of complex tasks are designed with a high degree of physical fidelity e.g. they provide similar stimuli, require the same motor responses, and so forth.
WO 02/05247 to Cognifit Ltd. teaches a method and apparatus for testing and training cognitive ability. This relies on selection and training of one or more separate, discrete, cognitive skills, without providing a system for enhancing an integrated cognitive control process.
No system currently exists for training a comprehensive range of cognitive components without requiring complete physical fidelity to the physical actions being performed during performance of the actual task.